Anthony gets to grips with a new gaming mouse
Whether you’re a serious PC gamer or not, you might well be aware that there are a few well-known and popular ways to hold a mouse. You might use a palm grip, perhaps, or a fingertip grip. Or you might be one of the gamers whose grip style shares a name with the Strix Claw.
Actually, though, having a claw grip style isn’t a prerequisite for using this mouse. Asus says on its website that the Strix Claw, in spite of its name, is suitable for all grip styles. It’s also said to be ideal for first-person shooters.
Why this might be, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s the 5000dpi optical sensor. Perhaps it’s the “high-quality Japanese-made Omron D2F-01F”. Or it could be something to do with the streamlined shape that provides “exceptional comfort”.
More likely it’s just a marketing ploy, because in all honesty the Strix Claw isn’t much different from any other high-quality gaming mouse on the market. But that’s not a bad thing. After all, you get four-stage, useradjustable sensitivity; back and forward buttons; a clickable scrollwheel and the ability to store your settings in the mouse or on your PC. Not all gaming mice have on-board memory for profiles, macros and so on, but it’s also not particularly uncommon either.
There is, however, one feature that does lend itself to first-person shooters. Directly below the back and forward buttons on the side of the Strix Claw is another thumb button. Although, like every other button on this mouse, you can customise what this does, by default its function in the Strix software suite is "DPI clutch (sniper)". What it does is allow you to quickly access another customisable sensitivity setting, but only when the DPI clutch is held down. The idea, as you can probably guess, is to make sniping in shooting games easier and more accurate.
You might think such hardware assistance is less than honest, but the fact is this feature simply offers something that’s already present in a lot of games: the ability to have different mouse speeds depending on whether you’re aiming down the sites of a gun or just shooting from the hip. Where games don’t include this ability, the Strix Claw steps up and fills the gap nicely.
Of course, there’s a chance you might never use this feature, but the presence of another button can be useful, no matter what game genre you’re playing. Its placement is less than ideal, though. In my time with the Strix Claw, I found it a little too easy to press the wrong thing in the tightly packed cluster of thumb buttons, and the forward button was particularly difficult to reach – unless I adopted a claw grip, bringing my thumb further up the body of the mouse.
Eventually, though, I grew accustomed to the positioning of these buttons and was able to use whichever grip type I wanted, but it’s certainly something to consider if you play with a fingertip style.
Thankfully, none of this prevents the Strix Claw from being a high-quality, righthanded gaming mouse. It’s comfortable to use, has a braided cable, has orange LED lighting and comes with a decent software package. And at around £40, it’s competitively priced too. Anthony Enticknap
Good for more than just shooters.